Sunday, March 9, 2008

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things!

     Alan is an obnoxious theater director who brings his acting troupe to a remote island to engage in some black magic tomfoolery. Actually, he's quite a dickhead with a terrible and often macabre sense of humor and delights in cheap pranks. Including rigging the cemetery with live people in graves to scare the shit out of his acting troupe, a truly fun guy to hang with. 

      He convinces the group that they're really gonna dig up a dead body in order to achieve a new level of acting skill ( y'know, for the hell of it). These fake corpses leap out of graves scaring the young actors to test their reactions. Eventually, we learn that to have a fake grave with an actor in it, you have to remove the original resident, in this case, a corpse named Orville. 

      The actors often try to outdo their teacher (impossible because this dude is a walking carnival) and act out a demon resurrection chant that the teacher tried to scare everyone with. Not having the ability to be outdone, he decides to make his relationship with Orville a rather close and disturbing one. He declares him as his new best friend and takes him back to the cabin that these people are staying in. He even stoops to the point of having a mock wedding where he actually marries Orville and even shares a bed for the night. 

      Then suddenly (for no real apparent reason) the dead actually start to rise from their graves. I guess they didn't find his pranks any more amusing than his troupe did. It soon becomes a "Night of the Living Dead" situation with a bunch of weird actors trapped in a cabin surrounded by zombies. They try to get away but are not successful. And as for Alan the demented theater director, he is finally given his comeuppance when Orville comes back to life and eats him. I guess he didn't appreciate being used as a party prop. 

      This campy classic is about an hour's worth of humor with bad jokes and great one-liners and the remaining 30 minutes is your typical zombie horror. Made in 1972, it has some of the grooviest wardrobes I've ever seen. A strange side note that I noticed during the credits, all but two of the actors in the movie used their real names for the characters they played.

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